March 22, 2010

As our group stood in the rain in the great arena of the stunning Roman
amphitheatre at El Jem in Tunisia, guess who volunteered the fact that "arena"
is the Latin for "sand", reflecting its capacity for soaking up the blood?

The weather was hardly ideal, but the conditions could not detract from the
wonder of this place. It's a World Heritage Site and it thoroughly deserves it.
This was the latest and grandest of three such buildings that had stood on this
site, and was built nearly 1800 years ago. Built to last, in spite of everything
- the weather, becoming a fortress and a refuge for the Berbers during wars with
the Arab invaders, and being bombarded by the Turks in a conflict over taxes -
plus functioning as a quarry for centuries.

The design is elliptical, the whole building measuring 148 by 122 metres, the
arena 65 by 39 metres; with a capacity bloodthirsty crowd of more than 30,000
and perhaps up to more than 40,000 it's considered the third largest
amphitheatre in the world - it's not as big as the Colosseum in Rome, but it's
arguably better preserved and just as magnificent. It is, frankly,
awe-inspiring.

There was no limestone, the Romans' favourite building material, easily
available in that part of Tunisia, so a sandstone from quarries 30 kilometres
away, close to the coast, was used. And the extraordinary thing is that this
sandstone is incredibly young - geologically - having formed in the Pleistocene
period a mere 125,000 years ago when northern Europe was in the grip of the Ice
Ages. It's a coarse-grained sandstone, with everywhere beautiful examples of cross-bedding
on all different scales (see photo below).

These sandstone blocks are from what is referred to as the Rejiche formation,
named after the hill from which the stone has been quarried. It's a very
calcareous sandstone, with shell fragments and ooids,
tiny spherical or egg-shaped (hence the name) grains of calcium carbonate
that formed chemically in warm seawater highly saturated in dissolved minerals.
These sands were formed
in shallow marine conditions, but also in coastal dunes, and they were cemented
early on in their history by water percolating through them, dissolving and
re-precipitating the calcium carbonate. So, young though they are, they,
combined with the skills of Roman construction methods, could make buildings
built to last. Their surfaces do, however, weather - quite often to form
miniature tafoni patterns (see this
and other posts on these natural sculptures):

But the immense structure of El Jem, with walls close to 5 metres thick, was
not just constructed out of these sandstones. Bricks were used for some of the
vaults, as well as concrete. Now I knew something about the Romans and their
skills at making concrete and referred to this in the book:

The recipe for basic concrete is simple and has been around for a long time.
The ancient Egyptians knew how to make it (there is a lively debate as to
whether the pyramids, at least in part, are made of concrete), and the Romans
perfected the formula. The fundamental ingredients are around 75 percent sand
and gravel, 15 percent water, and 10 percent cement. The cement, cooked from
materials such as limestone and clay, is the chemical glue; the hardening of
concrete is not simply due to drying, but involves complex chemical reactions.
The physical characteristics of the sand, its size and shape, influence the
properties of the concrete, but because of the importance of chemistry, the
composition of the sand and the other ingredients is critical. The wrong
impurities will ruin the quality of the concrete.

But, coincidentally, in the April issue of Earth Magazine that
recently came through the door, there's an article on "Why Roman Concrete Stands
the Test of Time," and it's fascinating. I don't know if they imported it into
North Africa (but given how much specialty material the Romans did import, I
wouldn't be surprised), but a specific deposit of volcanic ash was consistently
used as the chemically magic ingredient. The ash, from an explosive eruption
around 450,000 years ago, 20 kilometres from Rome, is also known as pozzolana, after the
location. Using it instead of Portland Cement makes for very different
properties of the resulting concrete, some advantageous, some less so. But the
Romans certainly did perfect this technology - it has stood the test of time
and using pozzolana is a far less energy-intensive process than that of
making Portland cement, offering some real possibilities for improving modern
technology.

The photos below show (not very clearly, I'm afraid - the lighting was not
great) very crude-looking concrete ceilings and their upper side viewed from
above. They have certainly stood the test of time.

The stone for El Jem may have been quarried locally, but the structure itself
later became a quarry - a source of building materials to be utilised far and
wide throughout Tunisia. We kept coming across bits and pieces - sometimes
substantial pieces - of Roman stone cannibalised and incorporated into houses
and medinas, kasbahs and mosques, wherever we went, including Tozeur, nearly 300
kilometres southwest of El Jem. Now clearly there were endless sources of Roman
materials in addition to the amphitheatre, but it does seem tragic that such a
magnificent construction should be used as the local DIY store.

The idiosyncratic examples of cannibalisation below are from the Greta Mosque
at Kairouan and the medina at Sfax.

Comments

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Michael,
Great posting and I love the last shots of the cannibalized columns. Quite attractive, actually. As you know, cannibalism of stone is a common practice. The one I am most aware of is the use of the Colosseum as building stone quarry in the 1500s and 1600s. It would be interesting to trace the history of this and see how it relates to other threads of history.
Cheers,
David

Great designs come from great and highly skilled architect. These structures are already tested by time and yet they still stood still. To thing that these were not made of sophisticated and advance materials that are now available. These structures should be protected and maintained in order for it to last longer.

Fethi - thanks for the comment. Unfortunately, being a geologist, I know more about the materials than the methods - architecture and building are not my specialty. I did, however, come across this comment on the famous underground buildings elsewhere in Tunisia, at Bulla Regia:

"Particularly interesting is the Bulla Regia unique site where Romans built underground rooms to protect them from the summer heat and cold of the winter. They employed hollow tubes In order to create light-weight overhead vaults (the same technique can be seen in Rome, where amphorae were often embedded into upper walls to make the load much lighter)."

A little research along these lines might provide more information on the answer to your question.